الحِمى

الحِمى

A reserved pasture closed to all but those for whom it is set aside; in Ibn Hisham the Prophet set a hima around the village of Jurash with marked boundaries for the horse, the riding camel and the plough-ox, declaring the property of any outsider who grazed it forfeit, and wrote to Hamdan that the heights and lowlands of their land were theirs to graze while they prayed and paid zakat. Al-Hamdani's gazetteer still maps the tribal himas by name two centuries on — the hima of Dariyya, of the Qutayf and of the Nuta among them ¹.